A friend for many years who happens to be chief financial officer for a Silicon Valley startup has this story to tell about his immigration problems at work:This is the immigration battle that I fight day-in and day-out. How do we attract the best and brightest to our shores (H1-B visas) so the jobs stay in America instead of transferring overseas? The technologists that we work with could work anywhere. We have to make it easy for them to come here and to contribute here and to have bright babies here and to have those babies set higher standards here. I see very, very few Smiths or Joneses or Johnsons who contribute […]

I’d been putting-off going to startups.cringely.com to finally read all 286 entries so far in this summer’s Cringely (NOT in Silicon Valley) Startup Tour. But when I finally went to the site, I couldn’t get in. The page timed-out. This was not good. Or maybe it was very good in that the site was so busy. But even that’s not good because I don’t like turning readers away. So which was it — good or not good?

Not good.

Twelve hours later, when I still couldn’t get in I called the CTO at the company that hosts that site — Democrasoft. You haven’t heard about them, believe me, and I’ll […]

My relationship with Google News has always run hot and cold. No make that cold and tepid. From the very beginning of Google News as an experiment back in 2001, they refused to index my work, which they said was my fault, not theirs (“they” being an algorithm attached to an e-mail box, of course). But new evidence has recently come to light suggesting to me that Google News has an actual blacklist.

For those not familiar with the expression, “blacklist” usually refers to Hollywood screen and television writers from the 1950’s McCarthy era who were thought to be communist sympathizers and were banned from working openly in the entertainment industry as a […]

Last week Cisco Systems made a big product announcement that the networking giant said would change the Internet forever. What could it be? Well it was a big router, a really big router that would allow more bits than ever to flow over the world’s fiber backbones. And the market yawned, because bits are a commodity and it is hard to tell a million bushels of wheat in a pile from two million bushels of wheat. And Cisco’s enterprise customers — its biggest business customers — have plenty of bandwidth already, thanks.

Well that’s the entire point: corporations, where T1‘s still dominate, use less bandwidth per person than we do at our house, […]

This just in from an old friend who only gets pissed-off when it is justified. He says Yahoo Mail has been going downhill for awhile and has lately become unusable. Is this an isolated incident or does it affect all 200+ million Yahoo Mail customers? What’s your experience?

Here is his:

This is unacceptable.

We can log into Yahoo Mail.
We can read our email.
We can move or delete our email.
WE CANNOT SEND EMAIL.

When we try to send email, we are asked to enter a Captcha code. We then receive a Yahoo error message stating the message was not sent. Due to spam problem sending has been disabled on our account.